Health care costs have been increasing at a fast rate. In an attempt to reform health care, legislation in the United States that includes incentivizing payors and providers to cooperate has been passed. As such, health providers are changing their approaches to providing health care to patients. Coordination of health care across multiple health care providers or health care organizations may not only decrease the cost of health care to payors, but may also improve the quality of health care to patients. Health care organizations may include pharmacy entities or enterprises that fill or provide prescription products and services, hospitals, health care data repositories, managed care organizations, physicians and/or physician groups, and other medical professionals that are licensed to prescribe medical products and medicaments to patients.
As a result, electronic prescriptions written by a physician are becoming increasingly more popular. However, electronic prescriptions from a physician are organized in a different format than the pharmacy prescription data necessary for a pharmacist to fill a prescription. Additionally, there are many variations of electronic prescriptions which have different data fields, some providing more detail than others and also which are organized in a variety of ways. The systems currently in place require a technician to read the electronic prescription and manually enter data from the electronic prescription into pharmacy prescription data fields. Once the technician has entered the data from the electronic prescription the pharmacist can fill the prescription. This manual process can be time consuming, leads to additional work for the technician and increases the likelihood of errors in the pharmacy prescription data.